Abstract Background: This case describes a substance-induced manic episode with psychotic features in which interaction with an AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot appeared to corroborate and reinforce the patient’s delusional thought content and to contradict medical advice. Excerpts from the patient’s interactions with the AI chatbot provide novel clinica...
Psychotic symptoms are uncommon and non-specific adverse effects of classic (serotonergic) psychedelics such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), psilocybin, and mescaline. They can emerge during the acute phase of psychedelic drug effects, persist into the subacute ("afterglow") period, or, in rare cases, develop into long-term psychotic illness. Across all...
Sleep paralysis (SP), an REM parasomnia, can be characterized as one of the symptoms of narcolepsy. The SP phenomenon involves regaining meta-consciousness by the dreamer during REM, when the physiological atonia of skeletal muscles is accompanied by visual and auditory hallucinations that are perceived as vivid and distressing nightmares. Sensory impression...
The study investigates two groups of participants of the SÄPT therapist's training starting in October 2022. The overall objective is to investigate the risks and benefits of personal experience (PE) with substance-induced altered states of consciousness for physicians or psychotherapists in the context of a training course for substance-assisted therapy. Sp...
BackgroundPersons with schizophrenia are excluded from psychedelic-assisted therapy due to concerns about the risk of triggering or worsening psychosis. However, there is limited meta-analytic data on the risk of psychedelic-induced psychosis in individuals with pre-existing psychotic disorders.MethodsWe conducted a systematic review, meta-analysis, and over...
BackgroundPsychedelic-assisted therapy refers to a group of therapeutic practices involving psychedelics taken under therapeutic supervision from physicians, psychologists, and others. It has been hypothesised that psychedelic-assisted therapy may reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, and existential distress in patients facing life-threatening diseases (e...
AbstractThe involvement of certain recreational drugs, namely, hallucinogens, in the development of hyperactive syndromes is well known, but not well studied. In this report, we expand on this relationship by documenting the development of substance-induced psychosis in a young patient who used a large amount of psilocybin and developed symptoms of a first p...
Altered waking states of consciousness and its underlying functional organization have gained increasing interest in recent years, i.e. in identifying the neural basis of consciousness. To overcome fundamental shortcomings of current methods to objectively assess the level of consciousness, the investigators propose here to apply a novel and empirically vali...
Despite the widespread application of drug modelling in psychiatric research, the relative value of different models has never been formally compared in the same analysis. Here we compared the effects of five drugs (cannabis, psilocybin, amphetamine, ketamine and alcohol) in relation to psychiatric symptoms in a two-part subjective analysis. In the first par...
Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic and a candidate drug model of psychosis. This study measured the effects of psilocybin on resting-state network and thalamocortical functional connectivity (FC) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Fifteen healthy volunteers received intravenous infusions of psilocybin and placebo in 2 task-free resting-stat...
Psychotomimetics like the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) antagonist ketamine and the 5-hydroxytryptamine2A receptor (5-HT(2A)R) agonist psilocybin induce psychotic symptoms in healthy volunteers that resemble those of schizophrenia. Recent theories of psychosis posit that aberrant encoding of prediction errors (PE) may underlie the expression of psych...
The history of serotonin research is closely related to the study of hallucinogenic drugs that function as agonists at serotonin-2A receptors. The fundamental idea that psychotic states seen in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia might be attributable, in part, to abnormalities in serotonergic systems began with the almost simultaneous discovery of l...
ObjectiveThe purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the current research on hallucinogen induced psychiatric disorders. In addition to LSD and psilocybin hallucinogens of biologic origin are increasingly used by adolescents and young adults.MethodsRelevant literature and related articles were identified by means of a computerized MEDLINE search...
RationaleMany studies have reported deficits of mismatch negativity (MMN) in schizophrenic patients. Pharmacological challenges with hallucinogens in healthy humans are used as models for psychotic states. Previous studies reported a significant reduction of MMN after ketamine (N-methyl-D-aspartate acid [NMDA] antagonist model) but not after psilocybin (5HT2...
Patients with schizophrenia exhibit diminished prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle reflex and deficits in the attentional modulation of PPI. Pharmacological challenges with hallucinogens are used as models for psychosis in both humans and animals. Remarkably, in contrast to the findings in schizophrenic patients and in animal hallucinogen model...
BackgroundPrevious studies indicate that mismatch negativity (MMN)-a preattentive auditory event-related potential (ERP)-depends on NMDA receptor (NMDAR) functioning. To explore if the strength of MMN generation reflects the functional condition of the NMDAR system in healthy volunteers, we analyzed correlations between MMN recorded before drug administratio...
Increasing evidence from neuroimaging and behavioral studies suggests that functional disturbances within cortico-striato-thalamic pathways are critical to psychotic symptom formation in drug-induced and possibly also naturally occurring psychoses. Recent basic and clinical research with psychotomimetic drugs, such as the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) glutamat...
The modulating effects of serotonin on dopamine neurotransmission are not well understood, particularly in acute psychotic states. Positron emission tomography was used to examine the effect of psilocybin on the in vivo binding of [11C]raclopride to D2-dopamine receptors in the striatum in healthy volunteers after placebo and a psychotomimetic dose of psiloc...
The effects of the indolehallucinogen psilocybin, a mixed 5-HT2 and 5-HT1 agonist, on regional cerebral glucose metabolism were investigated in 10 healthy volunteers with PET and [F-18]-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) prior to and following a 15- or 20-mg dose of psilocybin. Psychotomimetic doses of psilocybin were found to produce a global increase in cerebral met...
Five cases of poisoning by indigenous mushroom Hikageshibiretake (Psilocybe argentipes) are reported. As this mushroom contains psilocybin, in general, clinical features were similar to those seen by pure psilocybin. Acute toxic stuporous state with complete amnesia in the culminating period occurred in one case, psychedelic state with dreamy consciousness i...
